Learn how the E-N crime team does their jobs and read about the quirky characters they encounter and the sometimes bizarre things that can happen at a crime scene that don't make it into their stories.

Lomi Kriel: Lonely streets

The woman straggled down the street, shuffling in white tennis shoes and pulling her dark-blue windbreaker closer around her shoulders in the biting early-morning chill. Drawing loopy, figure-eights with her unsteady walk, she circled the West Side block: Chihuahua, Hamilton, Veracruz, Picoso.

She was alone tonight.

This block that’s normally a shop for women who come to sell their bodies was deserted.

The murder last week of one of their colleagues, 26-year-old Emmy Torres, appears to have scared them away. The heightened attention on their neighborhood also makes cops more curious and business bad.

Still, the woman pressed on.

“Yes, I’m scared but that’s life,” she said, tugging at her long, wavy hair held untidily with a white scrunchie. “Now leave me alone, I’m trying to do business here.”

There wasn’t much to be done.

Once, a dark-colored truck pulled up to her and some words were exchanged. But the deal must not have been sweet enough because the truck soon sped away, pulling into a darkened alley. Accompanied by the crow of a nearby rooster, a white four-door car lapped the block.

It, too, avoided the woman, who continued her lonely orbit into the night.

“It’s kind of eerily quiet,” said one police officer, after he pulled over an onlooker to inquire about her 3 a.m. intentions in an area known for its prostitution and drugs and where police routinely run license plate numbers for outstanding warrants. “As far as streetwalkers go, there’s nobody here tonight.”

But, he said, “I’ve been stopping everybody who’s out here. We’re doing the best we can to find out more about what happened.”

Torres was a mother of five and a heroin addict who turned to prostitution to support her and her boyfriend’s habit. Last Wednesday, she was found dead on a street nearby with a gunshot wound to her side. Neighbors told police they’d heard a woman scream, and then a car speed away. Some said the car was grey, although others described it as beige.

The word on the street is that one of Torres’ regulars, an older man in a gray car, was obsessed with her.

But police have no suspects and scant information to go on. So patrol officers in the area have been instructed to work the streets, to gather string.